Please Signal, use this opportunity. I really want to be on Signal AAAAH
Signal absolutely should not interoperate with other data-mining software.
And they won’t, for the same reason they removed SMS (no insecure messaging options).
That’s so short sided. Signal is useless if all your contacts only use WhatsApp.
It’s not useless. It has a very specific use that does not coincide with interoperability with data-mining corporations.
It also does not coincide with most people
It’s up to us to sway them over!
It doesn’t have to. It does, however, have to remain private.
Yeah I believe this to be a fallacy. If all your contacts use WhatsApp, they still haven’t grasped the concept of installing two applications side-by-side. Or they don’t fully understand why people are using signal over WhatsApp. If you fail both of those, congratulations, you’ve failed to be a self-aware tech user and you’re now demoted to a braindead consumer.
I know, mind blowing right? Point is, society in general should not accept others forcing you to keep the WhatsApp monopoly in tact, which is exactly what’s happening here.
It will take some time but eventually adoption will spread, even among your contacts. It’s just a matter of critical mass, and there are some pretty compelling features within Signal that make it a worthy replacement.
Why not convince people to use Signal as well? Even my family has a group chat on Signal. Of course, it’s a slow move with most people sticking to non-open chats. But it’s worth the effort I would say.
I remember the days when I spent time convincing people to use chat apps. The last one that stuck was WhatsApp.
I’ve since stopped installing new chat apps because people won’t use them.
WhatsApp just works. Wanna video call my Mum? Push a button. Wanna send a Lemmy meme to my mates? Yeah it’s 3 taps.
I open up Facebook on me birthday and press the ❤️ on the birthday messages then shut it down and don’t use it for another year.
But if I do that with WhatsApp then I don’t hear from people I actually care about.
I actually have a friend that refuses to use WhatsApp like I do with FaceFuck. “How does she do it then?” I hear you ask.
She uses Facebook Messenger.
That’s the hold Meta has on our communications
Meanwhile I can do all that what you describe on Signal just as easily as that. A friend of mine often sends me Instagram reels on signal because I don’t have any insta account. And I actually don’t know anyone who has or at least uses a fb account anymore xD
They have already announced that they will not be interoperable with insecure messaging apps unfortunately.
Eh, my missus insisted we use Signal, but it’s just flat out not as reliable. It misses messages very occasionally and it’s always at the worst possible time.
Like I get that it’s a tiny bit more private than Whatsapp, but I’m not running a terror cell or a paedo ring over here. I just want to know if she wants anything from the shop.
Classic “No thing to hide, nothing to fear.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument#Criticism
It’s private and you can verify that, not to mention it’s non-profit. WhatsApp claims to be private but Meta has broken promises before and doesn’t let us look at source code. It’s not a “tiny bit”
Meta … can’t guarantee “what a third-party provider does with sent or received messages.”
I’m more concerned with what the first-party provider is doing with my sent or received messages when that first-party is Facebook!
Meta … can’t guarantee “what a third-party provider does with sent or received messages.”
We (Meta) can guarantee that we do all the bad stuffs to your data!
I dislike when they say in news clips that Signal represents the “current gold standard” for E2EE chats, it doesn’t, Signal is a helluva lot better than the commercial stuff that mines user data but there’s stuff like SimpleX Chat that doesn’t leak even metadata because it doesn’t have it.
Still, this is a good thing, these megacorps have their iron grip on people because they have raised walls around their services making it painful for people to move to a different service, tearing down those walls can only help us all.
Would this mean I could finally ditch what’s app and use only Signal?
No, Signal announced they won’t implement interoperable messaging.
kind of dumb they could get huge market share
It’s not. There is no privacy if you send your message to Whatsapp servers.
There’s even less privacy if I have to have the WhatsApp app installed on my phone to send that message.
You have the big plus of not having the WhatsApp app installed and snooping around with all those permissions it has.
Yeah, this worked so well for XMPP when everybody federated with Gmail chat.
Signal does not care about “market share”, they’re a non-profit.
Them being nonprofit has nothing to do with the pursuit of marketshare. Plenty of nonprofits want to maximize marketshare. Them being nonprofit means they are mission-driven.
And what is that mission?
Per the Signal Foundation’s website:
Protect free expression and enable secure global communication through open source privacy technology.
Them being nonprofit has nothing to do with the pursuit of marketshare.
Um, of course it does? LOL
Them being nonprofit means they are mission-driven.
And what is that mission?
Let’s talk about what the opposite of their mission is: Mainly operating as a source of data collection and revenue for a corporate surveillance and advertising agency.
Do they want more users? Sure. Are they going to compromise on their core principles out of convenience for their users? Abso-fuckin-lutely not.
There’s also the opposite to consider: that users would decide to use WhatsApp instead of Signal because they can, which then puts you in the uncomfortable position I find myself in often where I have to tell people I’m not accepting their messages from insecure platforms.
Is there a reason this requirement doesn’t apply to iMessage as well?
I’ve read somewhere that iMessage wasn’t considered “big enough” to be considerate a monopoly. Which is bullshit if you ask me.
Kinda true in Europe though. Don’t know anyone who uses iMessage, it’s pretty much irrelevant. I know the situation in the US is quite different, but ultimately they don’t regulate for the US market.
To be fair here in Europe I know no one who uses iMessage.
@aberrate_junior_beatnik @penquin I found a nice page with statistics about the different messengers: engage.sinch.com/blog/most-pop…
It seems that only in the US more people are using iMessage than WhatsApp.
Its only big in the US, most of the planet only sees iMessage as that borderline useless app Apple bundles in their phones.
It’s annoying as fuck when I message my wife a video of our kids, it looks like dog shit on her iPhone. I have to instead send it on Whatsapp or signal. I hate apple
That’s because you’re using SMS, that’s not the fault of the messaging app. Using a third party messaging app is the correct way to go, it’s encrypted, supports group chats, and bigger messages.
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Hopefully not RCS, but maybe Matrix or the Signal protocol, as RCS is entirely controlled by Google and there aren’t any FOSS clients.
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Does this mean third party apps will be able to interact with whatsapp?
only when the service specifically requests it and agrees to Whatsapp’s terms.
So I [in theory, I don’t know how to start with this on a technical level] could make a third-party Signal-compatible app, but allow it to connect to Whatsapp instead of Signal? Even if I can’t use my Signal account to contact Whatsapp people, that’s still potentially useful. Although I imagine the terms I’d have to agree to to do so would be full of nonsense that stops this being remotely feasible.
could make a third-party Signal-compatible app, but allow it to connect to Whatsapp instead of Signal?
you’d have to create a messaging service, not just a client.
I guess I’m misunderstanding here - I thought Whatsapp would be the “service” in my case, I’m just making a client to hook into their, presumably open [to people who agree to whatever their terms are] API. So it’s more of a federation thing between services?
Meta says that it will only allow third-party developers to use another protocol besides Signal, “if they are able to demonstrate it offers the same security guarantees as Signal.”
If matrix finally finishes implementing MLS, maybe they could convince meta to use it.
Last time they touched an open chat protocol, they hung it out to dry. That was XMPP. That’s why more than half of the fediverse is reluctant or outright hostile to federate with anything meta.
maybe they could convince meta to use it
I think he/she meant convincing Meta to use MLS, not Matrix.
Now that I read it again, you may be right.
XMPP is used in many, many places. It’s just not usually explicitly known that the backend is using that protocol
You are underplaying the damage Google and FB did to XMPP. It wasn’t supposed to be relegated to an obscure backend protocol. The involvement of those companies ensured that it didn’t become a popular user-facing protocol.
